Rails does an awful lot to optimize page generation, but there are a number of hacks, tweaks, and usage patterns you should be using to get the most out of your app. Configuration tweaks There’s a lot of the Rails stack that’s written in Ruby, which is great – it’s portable, it’s flexible, it works [...]
Today we got word of yet-another-database-hack-with-plaintext-passwords. This time, it’s RockYou, purveyor of many of those Facebook and Myspace apps you use. Oops. Every time this comes up, everyone says “How naive! They should have been using salted hashed passwords!” This is true in any case where you don’t need to use the password again on [...]
Ran into a small issue in one of my user models. I was using a helper to display a user’s first name, last initial. It looked something like this: Seems innocent enough, sure. Except…it doesn’t work in multibyte character sets. The first Cyrillic speaker to sign up blew that all up. When parsing an XML [...]
I’ve been slamming my head against the wall for the past two hours. I had an OAuth connection to a remote service working just dandy in development, but as soon as I tried to use that exact same code with the exact same config and exact same gems in production…I was getting “401 unauthorized” errors [...]
HTTP overhead is expensive. DNS lookups are expensive. Start dropping a bunch of Twitter widgets, Google ads, and GetSatisfaction buttons into your killer new Web 2.0 social networking site and you’ll find that your painstakingly-optimized site has slowed to a crawl while the server sits there waiting on Amazon S3 to get its act together [...]
If you’re familiar with Ruby at all, you know that it can be a little wacky when it comes to memory usage. Most of us have observed a Mongrel/Passenger instance that starts out small and then grows by leaps and bounds, eventually settling on some uncomfortably high number. We’re going to fix that with Ruby [...]
I do a lot of memory and garbage analysis on my Rails apps, and in upgrading to Rails 2.3, I discovered a practical use for the new Rails Metal middleware. Dumping memory stats to my log was just sorta unreadable in a practical scenario, and was more or less entirely unusable in production. Fortunately, Metal [...]
Monitoring is big. Having an automated daemon watch your stuff and make sure it’s running properly can let you sleep at night, knowing that if something blows up, there’s an ever-watchful guardian ready to wake you up so you can fix it. There are a number of monitoring solutions that are popular these days, such [...]
Mass inserting is one of those operations that isn’t really well-supported by ActiveRecord, but which has to be done nonethless. You might say, “Well hey, I’ll just run a loop and create a bunch of AR objects, no sweat”. That’ll work, but if speed is a factor, it might not be your best option. ActiveRecord [...]
I recently ran across a rather bare post espousing some generic “optimization” techniques for Rails apps. It offered no education, no explanation, no benchmarks. So, I thought, why not put those claims to the test?
